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Originally Posted by Kali Yuga
"Those guys over there can buy (e)books that we can't"
and
"Those guys over there can buy (e)books cheaper than we can"
Now, I will leave it to you to determine if this is a legitimate set of complaints.
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In this day and age? By any and all means. Globalization is not a one-way street you know, i.e. for the manufactures to profit from offshore costs and salaries and home prices. The internet in particular is a great leveler here, allowing you to check prices in other parts of the world in an instant.
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Few of those who complain consider, let alone try to figure out, what the author is entitled to, or how poorly it would be received if the publishers and/or retailers openly violated the contracts.
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That's because customers and consumers don't (and really don't have to) give an, uh, airborne fornication, if you catch my drift: they see the results, the unavailability, the price difference and are pissed. End of story.
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Your local retailers will suffer, because either they will lose business or will have to operate on razor-thin margins in order to compete with retailers around the world.
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Yeah, because I would instantly start ordering my groceries from Kuala Lumpur just for the novelty of it.
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For example: At the moment, the Australian and American dollar are close to equal. However, the AUD exchange rate was once closer to 1.9 AUD per USD, and could easily return to such figures. As a result, if we got rid of any tariffs, VAT or additional fees and allowed Australians free access to US ebook retailers: an ebook that costs USD $10 could cost AUD $10 today, AUD $12 next year, AUD $15 the following year and AUD $19 six months later. This is hardly a setup that can indefinitely guarantee price parity.
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What
are you talking about? Of course the seller sets the price, in USD in this case. Any currency fluctuations would be borne by the buyer, obviously. For the seller this wouldn't matter one bit, he'd get the asking price and be done with it. It's just that they don't even want to (aren't allowed to, whatever) do business with 'em foreigners.
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The local publishers will know the local market, the local media, the local taxes, and will have a greater incentive to translate and sell works.
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You don't get it, do you? I don't
want a translation. I want the exact same product they're selling in the US, only they won't sell it to me and no European publisher shows an interest in bringing the book over here because there are too few people like me. So it's a lose/lose proposition, really.
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Just because you can sell an English version of a book from a single server in Oregon doesn't mean that is the best approach.
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Yes it is, when that's the book (some) people want. I don't want to read it in German, or French, five years hence. I want it in English, and I want it now. And I'm prepared to pay for it, but (local sales tax and such notwithstanding) not obscenely more than people in the US.
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... none of the suggestions ... would result in permanent price parity anyway.
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Nobody demands such a thing, just that a global product has a (more or less) global price. A "just" price, if you will. Currency fluctuations (which work both ways, by the way) will obviously have to be borne by the buyer.
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Thus, "let us buy American goods!" rather than develop better prices and services in a local market is, at best, a chimera that is only shiny for as long as the USD is weak...
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Do tell? Currently it's the other way round, at least where the Euro is concerned.
Bottom line: Geo restrictions are silly if only because they prevent people from buying what they actually want to buy.